by Sam Lock
I looked about me, and seeing a book on a table placed quite close to me, I picked it up. It was a collection of poems by Yeats – a writer I’d heard of, at least, but not yet read. And as I began thumbing through its pages, Patrick returned, having removed his shirt (which didn’t surprise me at all) and looking dashingly athletic, I thought, in a white, ribbed, close-fitting vest.
‘You know those poems?’ he asked, as he came across to me and slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Do you?’ he asked again, as he took the book away from me and quickly brushed my cheek with his lips.
‘Take this off – shall we, Eddie?’ he said, as he swiftly unbuttoned my shirt. ‘And these too?’ he whispered softly in my ear, as he then began to unbuckle the belt of the soft cord trousers I was wearing.
And what I remember with such clarity is how sweet was the smell of his flesh. We had both been drinking quite heavily that evening, and it astonishes me to think that the smell of beer and whisky didn’t predominate. I just know that as he slipped out of his clothes and then came to stand in front of me naked, I have this memory of our sharing such a very particular bodily smell – good, clean; marvellously rich it was – and one that grew even stronger as he drew me down to lie with him on the carpet, before the soft glow of an electric fire; where he had hastily spread a rug to make us more comfortable. And I remember too how strangely beautiful I found his body – more muscular than I had expected it to be; and how I noticed a strong, blue vein that curled snake-like across his forearm and on towards his fingers.
‘You like this, Eddie?’ he asked, as he caught hold of one of my hands and guided it swiftly towards his groin, and as he then slipped one of his own hands between my legs and began to fondle my testicles.
‘Yes,’ I answered, because I did: because I found his penis strong and nicely formed, and because as he began to kiss me and so to heighten the emotion flowing between us, I knew that I wanted to give in – that I wanted him to make love to me, and to experience, which I had not done as yet, a different type of sex from the one that I had experienced with Tom in the woods; one that would make me richer, I thought, and wiser, and that might put me more at ease with myself.
‘What do I do here, Eddie?’ I heard Mark ask. ‘Do I turn right or left?’ – which brought me sharply back into the present. There was scarcely time for me to to recognise where we were, and to know which direction we had to take, before we arrived at a crossroads.
‘Right, Mark!’ I almost shouted, as a signpost loomed in front of us. ‘We turn right! Here! Now!’
Mark had to make a sharp swerve, and there was a noisy screech of brakes as he just managed to swing the nose of the car into the narrow country lane that led to my aunt and uncle’s farm. It was about to turn dark, and the car’s headlamps had been switched on, and their harsh beams of light were raking the hedgerows at either side.
‘What the heck do we do, Eddie,’ Mark asked, sounding a little unnerved, ‘if something comes the other way?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I answered. ‘People are used to the narrowness of the roads and lanes down here. They’ll stop; and they’ll reverse their car to some gateway where they can pull in. Or we’ll do that, if one seems nearer – and then we’ll pass each other carefully.’
Mark thought this quaint and rather amusing. ‘So this is the country, is it?’ he said, with a smile all over his face. ‘Ha! you country lad, you,’ he added with a laugh, forgetting, I thought, that I was a grown man. Then he leaned across and kissed me.
I had never imagined that I would be able to take someone with me into my past – not someone with whom I was intimate, in the way that I was with Mark. And had my parents still been alive, I know it couldn’t have happened. So I felt particularly grateful towards my aunt Sarah for having said, when I had asked to bring Mark with me, ‘Bring anyone you like, Eddie. You know you can. You are always welcome here.’
None the less, I did feel a trifle apprehensive as we arrived, worrying what my aunt and uncle would think of Mark and whether they would guess how close we were to each other; or whether I would need to give some hint of it perhaps, or some direct form of explanation. How stupid that proved to be, however, and how lacking in an understanding of people’s characters; for no sooner had we brought our luggage in from the car than my uncle said to us, as if to put us more quickly at our ease, ‘We’ve put you in the big room at the front, Eddie. You’ll both be comfortable there … Apple sweet,’ he added, with a smile.
‘Yes,’ said my aunt, chiming in. ‘And Amy’s been here today, giving a hand; so the bed’s had a good airing. And there are clean towels on the rack, Eddie, beside the washstand; and – well, you know about the toilet, don’t you? You’ll have to explain that to Mark. It’s a little primitive here, Mark, I’m afraid.’
‘What did your aunt mean by that?’ Mark asked as we made our way up the twisting wooden staircase that led to the upper floor.
‘Oh, I’ll explain … You’ll see,’ I answered, noticing that I was passing things on the walls that were familiar to me from my childhood. A pretty mirror, with a small, painted shelf beneath it, that I knew would become a treble looking-glass, if one released a small catch at its side. A large photograph of my aunt’s parents – my grandparents – dressed soberly in black, and seated on heavy, country chairs before a whitewashed stone wall; with, placed next to it, a sepia-coloured photograph of my uncle Fred in uniform, looking terribly fit, I thought, and young; and with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
‘Your uncle?’ Mark asked.
‘Yes. In the army. Smart – wasn’t he?’
‘Sexy, too,’ Mark answered. ‘Do you think –?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said firmly, knowing Mark’s tendency to believe that all men shared his sexual preferences.
‘Well, they don’t have children, do they?’ he said.
‘Lots of people don’t have children,’ I said, hoping to end the subject. ‘Go through that door, Mark,’ I added, ‘straight ahead of us. Our room’s beyond that.’
Mark pushed open the door of a bedroom that was never used – except perhaps at Christmas-time, when there might be a few card tables placed around the bed – and that more or less served as a corridor, leading to the much larger room beyond; where, as we went in, we were met by the delicious smell of apples and the comforting glow of a small coal fire burning in an open, cast-iron grate.
Mark sniffed the air, as if to say how puzzled he was by the smell.
‘Look,’ I said, crossing to lift a corner of the bed’s thick coverlet, and to reveal on the floor beneath it a large wooden tray full of dark-green, sour-looking cooking apples.
‘It’s the best way to store them,’ I explained. ‘They’re beneath all the beds. Each apple has to be placed free of the rest, so that if one happens to rot, the others won’t be affected. Lovely smell, though – isn’t it? “Apple sweet”, as my uncle said.’
‘And what about the toilet?’ Mark asked. ‘What do I need to know about that?’
‘Well, there’s no lavatory at this end of the house, so we’ll have to use this,’ I said, pointing to a heavy, walnut commode in one of the bedroom’s corners.
‘Use that!’ Mark exclaimed with a laugh, as he lifted up its lid.
‘Yes. That,’ I answered him, in a slightly bossy manner.
The next morning – that was last Saturday morning – I woke early, with Mark sleeping beside me, and with the sun already up and casting sharp beams of light on to the room’s faded Turkish carpet. Should I get out of bed, I wondered, and go down to breakfast without Mark? Or should I wait for him to wake? At which point I heard a gentle knock on the bedroom door.
‘Come in,’ I said quietly, so as not to wake Mark; and saw the door open and my uncle appear in a dressing gown, carrying a small tea-tray in his hands.
‘Thought you’d like a cup of tea,’ he said, placing the tray on a table beside me. ‘Mark still asleep?’ he asked.
‘Sounds like it,’ I replied
– at which my uncle smiled. ‘Well, come down when you’re ready,’ he said. ‘You slept well, I hope.’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Very. Mark too, as you can see.’
I expected my uncle to leave the room, but instead he crossed to its main window, where he paused to look out.
‘Your aunt and I are pleased you’re here, Eddie,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘Thanks, Uncle Fred,’ I answered. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I just wanted to tell you that,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Wanted you to know that.’ With which he thrust his hands into his dressing-gown pockets and turned to leave.
‘Uncle Fred,’ I said to him, ‘Do you remember those Christmas parties? The ones you used to have when I was small?’
‘Oh, my goodness me, yes. Wonderful times they were, weren’t they? Up all night we used to be … Couldn’t do that now, though, could we? … Still, they’re there, you know, in memory – stored away. Everything’s there. And it’s wonderful to have it, too … You should feel that, Eddie, coming down here again, after so long.’
‘I do,’ I answered, as I heard the sound of dogs barking in the farmyard below the window.
‘Ned’s early,’ my uncle remarked – Ned being one of the farmhands who worked for him. ‘Thank God I don’t have to do any of it now – not if I don’t want to. But I still give a hand with the milking, you know. Machines now, of course, which makes it easier. And your aunt still bakes her own bread … Ah, well – life goes on. It has to … until you’re in the grave,’ he added with a rich chuckle and with a nod of his head towards Mark, as if to say that, in his view, the direction of my life might possibly lie with him. Then he quietly closed the door of the room and left.
VIII
Today is a Sunday, and because it’s been such a good one, I feel like writing about it now. As usual, I had lunch with Len and Thelma (what a habit that has become!), which was wonderful; and this evening I saw Mark, who has just left to go home because he has such an early start tomorrow; and he was wonderful too. What I enjoyed so much, though, was that Len came to collect me early. He usually comes at twelve and we eat at one, but today he arrived at eleven – deliberately, he said – so that we could have one of our talks, which I always enjoy – which we both enjoy. I know I have mentioned before how lucky I was to meet him, but I think I have not yet done his influence justice, for if Patrick educated me in the ways of the city, Len certainly did in the ways of the mind – in books, in literature, in thought.
We first met when I was only sixteen years old, and I am now in my thirties; and throughout all the years that we have known each other, he has always been my mentor, as I might call him – my spiritual guide. Not, as I have already said, that we are always in agreement regarding our tastes in artistic matters, but we are regarding politics, both of us being left-wing and, unlike Thelma, on the side of the poor and needy. In the world of books and words, though, there are differences over which we will often argue vehemently and occasionally almost quarrel.
Today, it’s again been over my liking for the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett – Dame Ivy as we should call her, really, since she’s been given that form of recognition. I tried to explain that it seems to me that she is portraying a subjective world in a surprisingly objective manner – something which I am sure must be difficult to do. Also, that, in my view, this seems to be a most serious aim for any modern writer; because it seems to be the inner world – the subjective one – that is causing us so much trouble today. Perhaps because it is being neglected, I said to him, due to so much emphasis having been placed upon the outer one and upon its scientific developments.
‘It’s like Hitchcock’s films,’ I told him, ‘which you don’t approve of either. You want everything to be rationalised, explained away; made logical …’ And so it went on for almost an hour, Len answering me with his view, all of which was hugely enjoyable for us both.
Perhaps, too, I could have said (which I didn’t think of doing at the time) that I see in Dame Ivy’s work some of the family suffering that I myself have experienced – and that this probably draws me to it: that I’ve experienced tyranny and parental coldness and rejection, and awful physical humiliation. But, unlike the characters in Dame Ivy’s novels, I’ve not stayed within the family and suffered it there. I’ve broken free – or I have tried to break free – and have attempted to face it on my own; something at which I’ve not been very successful, alas, in that I’m still somewhat inhibited – and, of course, still have the need at times to steal, which I am sure is a sign that I am running away from something – something inside myself; much as (as I have said before) that compulsion has slackened its grip on me a little since I’ve met Mark; and even more so, I’ve noticed, since I’ve talked to him about it.
What’s been so encouraging has been to find that Mark can make jokes about it. ‘You didn’t nick anything, I hope,’ he said playfully, when we left the farm after our weekend there. And I was able to laugh at that, rather than read it as being some kind of rebuke; and this has acted for me as a relief.
Regarding I.C.B. (Ivy Compton-Burnett): I wish I could have met her. She’s now very old, and ill, I gather, according to something I read about her the other day; and it saddens me to think that, in a while, there will be no more of her books: no more of those cooped-up families of hers, who bicker and quarrel so, and who occasionally do quite murderous things to one another. But at least I’ll have her novels in my bookcase – all of them – which I have collected gradually over the years. And I really do believe that if I were to become a writer I would use her work as some kind of model; in that she has shown such strength, it seems to me, in turning away from the topography of the outer world to create – well, I suppose one could say that her books are psychodramas of a kind, in the way that I suppose Jacobean plays might be said to be that. They recognise that the inner world is a dark and dangerous place, full of incestuous tendencies, in that all its ‘characters’ – all its various ‘parts’ – have no choice but to put up with the closeness of cohabitation. And there is no way out for them. They somehow have to get on with one another – with the mixtures of opposites they represent; otherwise, their world would split, become a divided one, and that would lead to their self-destruction. Which, now that I come to think of it, could surely be looked upon as being an apt or appropriate symbol of the present state of the world.
There! I’ve said something on paper that I’ve been wanting to say for a very long time; and even if it’s been said clumsily, it is something I’m glad to have done. And perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to write about something else that I want to set down; a memory that came back to me only yesterday, but that I had obviously thrust out of my conscious mind for – how many years must it be? twenty or more? – and that has to do with that most difficult of all subjects (difficult for me, I mean), which is my relationship with my father.
It is unusual for me to want to write in the morning, before I go off to work. I write mostly in the evenings – sometimes quite late; or, at the weekends, during the afternoons, which is really my favourite time. But the memory I mentioned yesterday, that I seem to have kept locked away inside me in some private pocket of my unconscious, has been on my mind for the past half-hour, so I feel like trying to write about it now, while I am still in bed and when Mark isn’t here.
It goes back to before my teens, when I must have been about ten, or maybe even younger; and to a Saturday afternoon when the house was quiet, with my mother having retreated to her room, and with Amy having cleared away the lunch things, and to my father calling me into his office, which, being placed at the very back of the house, and its windows heavily darkened by the tall yew trees of the churchyard, was always a rather gloomy place.
‘Close the door, Edwin,’ he said, in a voice that upset me, on account of the coldness of its expression.
‘Come here,’ he said, beckoning me towards his desk, and looking at me with those cold, reptilian eyes of his.
‘Mr Barlow’s been here,’ he said, ‘and has told me that you have taken something from his shop. A bag of sweets, apparently; when you thought he wasn’t looking … Now, is this true, Edwin, or is it not?’
‘It is, Father,’ I answered – for, from the very first, if caught and questioned, I never denied my thefts.
‘You mean, you did take them. You did steal them?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Why?’ he asked, his voice almost quaking with suppressed anger. ‘You must know it is wrong to take things that do not belong to you. So why did you do it? Your mother gives you pocket money – and surely enough for a bag of sweets. So why? Why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know, Father. I just did.’
‘And that is all you have to say about it?’
‘Yes, Father.’
There was a pause before he asked if I had done such a thing before.
‘Yes, Father,’ I said. ‘Several times.’
I could see that he didn’t want to believe me.
‘You do realise how serious this is,’ he said.
‘Yes, Father. I think I do.’
‘And what have you done with them – with the sweets? You can’t have eaten them. Mr Barlow said this happened just now – just a short while ago. So where are they? What have you done with them?’
To this I refused to answer, and I knew at once that I was entering dangerous ground as far as my father’s patience was concerned; but, without knowing why, I felt a strong need to defy him.
‘Are you going to tell me, Edwin, where they are? Have you hidden them?’
I remember that I had in fact done just that. I hadn’t opened the bag – I had just run with it to my room and hidden it beneath a pile of handkerchiefs in a drawer. For even in those early days of the compulsion from which I suffer, I wasn’t interested in the sweets themselves. It was the act of taking them that meant so much to me; and the subsequent act of hiding them and of storing them away seemed part of some ritual I liked to enjoy; or perhaps needed to honour or to observe might be a better way of putting it.